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  She was like the girl in the teen rom-com sitting all alone on the porch steps in her prom dress, waiting for a boy who wouldn’t show up, long after someone smarter (and less pathetic) would have said fuck it and gone to the dance on their own.

  Sarah wasn’t entirely alone in the suite of rooms that made up the Subs’ Garden. Actress Cali Leonard sat on a stool in front of the long vanity counter, applying her makeup. She’d been called right after the announcement, and had exited the Subs’ Garden wearing a pair of heavy metal cuffs that looked almost medieval.

  Sarah sat down beside her. “Hi. What’s your letter?”

  The other woman stiffened just slightly, and it was only then that Sarah picked up the leave-me-alone-vibes that the other woman was giving off. Sarah hesitated, ready to rise and go back to the lounge area. Apparently no one wanted anything to do with her tonight. Not her partner, not this other sub.

  The sinking feeling in her stomach solidified into a ball of painful embarrassment.

  Before she could push to her feet, Cali replied. “M. What’s your letter?”

  Sarah knew she should leave, give the other woman space, but she was tired of fruitless waiting and silence. Screw it, she’d pretend that she hadn’t seen the other woman stiffen, hadn’t picked up on those first “go away” cues.

  “I don’t know. I haven’t been called yet.” Sarah leaned on the counter. Under the embarrassment there was another feeling. No, more than a feeling. A need. One that had been plaguing her since Wednesday.

  “I needed to scene this weekend,” Sarah said softly, hoping the other sub would understand.

  Cali put down the makeup, focusing on Sarah. “I know the feeling. Have you heard from your partner at all?”

  “Nope. I’ve been here all night. Everyone else at least knows what’s going on—they know they’re supposed to come back next week if they aren’t playing this weekend.” Sarah sat up, crossing her arms protectively over her stomach. “Anna, Mae, Sejal, Victoria, you…all got called. Know what your letter is.”

  “Were you scheduled to be here this weekend?” Cali asked.

  “No, I came because of the meeting, but was planning to stay and play. After the week I’ve had…”

  She didn’t want to think about her week. About her life outside of here. She looked away from Cali, and ended up looking at herself in the mirror.

  She’d done her hair when she first got here, straightening it before adding some loose curls to give it texture. Seeing herself, seeing the time and effort she’d put into her appearance irritated her. She snatched a hair tie out of a jar full of them on the vanity and jerked her hair back into a bun.

  She wasn’t going to think about her week, wasn’t going to give into the embarrassment she felt because she hadn’t been called. She had nothing to be embarrassed about. She should feel angry. “Okay, enough moping. I know I’m not really the only one who doesn’t know their letter.”

  Cali was putting on eyeliner. “You’re welcome to vent all you want. And call your top, whoever they might be, a jerk for keeping you waiting.”

  The question was why was he keeping her waiting?

  What was it about her that her unknown partner objected to? Or maybe it wasn’t even that strong of a feeling. Maybe he’d gotten her name, and shrugged, not interested enough to even bother to plan their scene.

  She was forgettable, and her partner had forgotten her.

  Embarrassment finished its slow morph into full-on shame. Her stomach clenched and her throat tightened, but outwardly she kept it light.

  “Right?” She joked to Cali. “Mind if I’m nosy and live vicariously through you?”

  “It started with manacles,” Cali said.

  The heavy metal restraints hadn’t been cuffs. Manacles.

  Sarah sat, listening to Cali recount the medical scene she’d been subjected to. Sarah’s own body thrummed in arousal and submissive need. Her nipples were hard, and with each breath they skimmed against the silky fabric of her robe.

  But then the talk turned away from explicit scene play-by-plays to Cali and Master Zidan. Like Anna, Cali was in a relationship with her Dom outside of the club. They were married.

  Cali told Sarah her story. How the marriage was in name only. How though she loved Zidan, he didn’t love her.

  And Sarah’s heart broke, because she knew what Cali was feeling. Knew what it was to suffer from the humiliation of rejection. The conversation wound down in the wee hours of the morning.

  Cali seemed lighter after unburdening herself. They hugged, and then the actress asked, “What about you? Are you going to stay?”

  “I think so,” Sarah answered. “I’ll probably go see if there’s a spare bed. Maybe my partner will call me tomorrow.” There was a dorm with bunk beds that were first come, first served. It may have sounded Spartan, but in reality the dorm was as luxurious as all the other places in the club.

  “I bet they will,” Cali said.

  Cali had been open and honest with her. The wee hours of the night were made for honesty and confessions. And yet what came out of her mouth was pure fiction. Sarah thought back to her barbarian Dom fantasy. Thought about what Cali had just told her, about the complex, emotionally fraught relationship between Cali and her husband-who-was-now-more-than-in-name-only.

  What Cali had might be complex and messy, but she had something. Someone.

  Sarah didn’t. And it seemed she was forgettable. Easy to ignore. Even when she was assigned a partner.

  “Maybe they’re keeping me waiting as a form of punishment,” she said aloud.

  “Have you pissed any of the Doms off lately?”

  Sarah faked a wince. “Sort of…”

  “Uh oh.”

  “Yea. Usually I’m good at minding my manners.” She was making it up as she went along. “But sometimes I talk back, get bratty. Some people just rub you the wrong way, you know?”

  “I do know.” Cali raised her brows. “You’re probably going to be paired with whoever it is you’ve pissed off.”

  If only. No one was interested enough in her to be pissed off at her.

  But she lied to Cali, and a little to herself. And both that night, as she lay in a bunk, and in the nights after—her partner never contacted her, and she left Las Palmas unsatisfied and ashamed—Sarah retreated into daydreams and fantasies.

  The Doms in her dreams never lost interest in her. Were never content with a quick spanking—a perfunctory amount of impact play and dominance—before using her as a waitress for the evening or an easy fuck.

  No, in her fantasies she was the heroine in a romance novel. Captivating and worth fighting for.

  And if—after a combination of her fantasies and various battery-powered toys helped her achieve orgasm—she lay in bed and cried, at least there was no one there to see exactly how pathetic and forgettable she was.

  He landed at LAX mid-week. It had been sixty-seven days since he’d last seen the inside of his condo, and forty-five since he’d had the opportunity to give in to his darker impulses.

  He seriously considered going to a public club, or maybe finding a scene partner in an online community.

  The darkness inside him, the need, was so great he wasn’t sure he could wait.

  But in the end he decided to use the waiting. Use it to study the file he’d gotten on his partner. To review the BDSM checklist items for the letter O.

  He used the time to plan exactly how he was going to play the game, and how he was going to play with Sarah.

  CHAPTER 2

  Voyeurism had never really been one of her kinks, but Sarah was starting to think it was one she could actively acquire.

  After all, all she had been doing was waiting and watching.

  At least tonight there was something exciting to watch. She wasn’t the only one crowded around watching a Dom practice with a six-foot whip. She’d missed the start of his scene, because she’d lingered in the Subs’ Garden, waiting to see if she got any summons to meet wi
th her game partner. By the time she made it to the Iron Court, where he was showing off with the whip, there was already a crowd.

  She’d overheard a few people say that this was part of the scene for W. That certainly made sense if whip was one of the items on the W list, probably the most stereotypical whip that anyone could use would be the big, scary, dangerous-if-you-didn’t-know-what-you-were-doing, six-foot whip.

  The Dom rolled his shoulders, set his feet, and then flicked his arm. The crack of the whip echoed against the walls and the stone statuary in the Iron Court.

  Around her, people jumped in reaction to the loud, sharp sound. A second after that there were a few nervous laughs and rumblings from the predominantly male tops who were watching.

  The Master looped the whip over the arm of one of the statues, then reached back between his shoulder blades, grabbed the black T-shirt he was wearing and pulled it off in that oddly sexy, masculine, manner of removing shirts. Sarah wasn’t the only one who made an appreciative noise as his well-muscled back was exposed. One of the things that had first drawn her to BDSM was the fact that appearance did not really matter. The BDSM community was in fact far more accepting of the reality of human bodies and what people looked like naked than the general population.

  With that being said, the majority of the members of Las Palmas were gorgeous and fit, but that had far more to do with the fact that the monthly membership dues were so astronomically high that everyone who was a member here was incredibly financially successful outside of the club. It was a hard reality that quite often people who were financially successful were more attractive because physical attractiveness mattered even when people didn’t want it to.

  But there was something about this man’s well-muscled body that made her think he did some sort of manual labor job. It wasn’t the sort of sculpted, precise musculature that she was used to seeing from people who develop those muscles in a gym setting. As he plucked the whip off of the statue and rolled his now-bare shoulders, Sarah had a brief vivid fantasy of him as a lumberjack. Change that whip into an axe and she could see him easily splitting log after log.

  Crack. He flicked the whip again resulting in a perfect echoing sound, which she knew was actually far more difficult to elicit than most people thought. She had attended a fair number of demonstration and information sessions about various BDSM toys and practices—including how to use a six-foot whip—on her own journey into the kink lifestyle.

  He moved his arm, but rather than up, his hand moved out to the side, and then he flicked his wrist in a deceptively small motion.

  This time instead of cracking the whip in the air, he snapped it so that it wrapped around the waist of one of the nearby statues. That particular statue depicted a roughly carved woman kneeling with her arms up, forearms on top of her head, hands cupping the opposite elbows.

  With a jerk of his wrist, the whip unwound from around the statue’s waist.

  “Watch and listen.” The man’s voice was a dark rumble that nonetheless carried through the crowd. “The whip cracks before it touches her. I can do this to a person, and leave less of a mark than a crop would.”

  The Iron Court was lit with gas torches that cast flickering golden light. When he turned, now side-on to her, the light from the torch flames danced along the muscles of his arm.

  He had seriously sexy arms, but somehow looking at his arms led her back to thinking about him as a lumberjack.

  That in turn popped up a mental picture of him still here in the deliberately dangerous looking Iron Court courtyard wearing not leather pants with a black T-shirt discarded over on the base of the statue, but instead wearing jeans, suspenders, and a flannel. That visual was so jarring, the flannel she’d imagined so out of place, that it startled a laugh out of her.

  Her attention was jerked back to reality when he once again cracked the whip in the air.

  She glanced up, then froze.

  He was looking right at her.

  Oh God, he’d heard her laugh.

  Sarah felt her eyes widen and started to fall back a step.

  She’d drawn the attention of the Dom she had never seen before, meaning she knew nothing about him, and she’d drawn it by seemingly laughing at him. This was bad.

  Yet, a little thrill of excitement ran through her.

  And it was that excitement that knocked her back into reality. He wasn’t looking at her. Even if he had heard her laugh, she doubted that he even paid any attention to it. To her. The crowd of people watching this little demonstration included not only couples and Doms, but a few lone subs. People far more interesting, more likely to attract the attention of the Dom, than her.

  Sarah crossed her arms over her middle, hugging herself. She was once more in the high-waisted black leather underwear, but tonight she also wore a soft black halter bralette and a knee-length black robe in deference to the chill that was inevitable on the nights she had to spend the entire evening outdoors in the courtyards watching other people enjoy themselves.

  Hugging herself a little harder, Sarah stared down at the toes of the ballet flats she had on. It was Thursday night, the start of the weekend. If she let herself fall into that sad, woe-is-me feeling this early in the game, she’d end up skipping the next two nights at the club.

  It hurt, coming here and having no one to scene with because everyone but her had a partner thanks to the checklist game.

  It hurt more to stay away. She may have been forgettable to other members of the club but she couldn’t force herself to forget or ignore her own need for kink. Life would be so much easier, and potentially her self-worth a little bit higher, if she could.

  Either way it was time to move on and go somewhere else. Hopefully no one had noticed her thinking that the Dom with the whip was looking at her when he clearly hadn’t been. Embarrassing enough that she’d just done the equivalent of thinking the person in the elevator was trying to start a conversation with her when in reality she just hadn’t seen their headphones, and hadn’t realized they were actually talking to someone they cared about on the phone.

  Without looking up, Sarah took a step back, hoping to simply fade back and out of the crowd.

  The whip cracked again, and it sounded closer. She jumped in reaction, her head jerking up.

  The man with the whip was looking right at her. And he was smiling. At least she thought he was. There wasn’t enough light for her to really read his expression. From here it looked like a smile that was somewhere between sass and sadism.

  “Where do you think you’re going?”

  Sarah glanced to her left, then to her right. The people closest were looking at her expectantly. Mae, standing within the circle of Xavier’s arms, widened her eyes, blinked slowly, then slid her gaze to the whip-wielding Dom and back to Sarah.

  He actually had been looking at her?

  The crunch of a heavy boot on the sandy soil of the Iron Court brought her attention around. He was close, close enough that now she could see that his eyes were brown—a shade darker than his hair—and the rough stubble along his jaw. Close enough that she could see the way the torchlight gleamed on the leather of the whip that he had coiled in one hand.

  He stopped less than a meter from her, and Sarah’s emotions were a chaotic mix of absolute delight that anyone was paying attention to her, and horror that the reason he was paying attention to her was because she had behaved rudely by first laughing at and then ignoring him. That would have been rude in any situation, but bordered on suicidally rude behavior for a submissive to exhibit at a BDSM club.

  “I’d like an answer.” He uncoiled and then re-coiled the whip so it made a large circle, about the size of a hula hoop.

  “Uh…” She stared blankly at the Dom, her disparate reactions rendering her temporarily mute.

  “In that case, last chance to make a strategic retreat.”

  Sarah looked up, meeting his gaze, trying to figure out how offended he was. If he was offended. The damn shadows made it hard for
her to interpret his expression. Or maybe he was naturally inscrutable.

  His brows rose and then he raised his arm, dropping the circle of the whip over her head to capture her within the coils of leather. He pulled and she stumbled forward into his personal space, close enough that she could smell him. He smelled like leather and some sort of mineral oil and man sweat.

  God, he smelled good.

  “Since you’re still here, Sarah, are you ready to help me demonstrate?”

  “Demonstrate?” Fantastic. She sounded like a blithering idiot.

  “Demonstrate that I can wrap the whip around a sub…around you…without hurting you.” His free hand gestured at the statue of the kneeling submissive.

  “You want to…” She looked down at the whip encircling her, then up at his face. “You want to use a six-foot single tail whip on me?”

  She’d expected him to smile. She’d deliberately asked the question in a slightly incredulous way, having finally gotten her brain engaged. But he didn’t smile. His head dipped down just a few inches closer to her, and that cast shadows over his face until she couldn’t see features except for a slight twinkle where the firelight glinted off his eyes.

  “Yes, Sarah, you. Don’t you trust me?”

  “Trust you? I don’t even know you.” Even as she spoke, another thought was running through her mind.

  How did he know her name?

  He tugged her forward again until her arms, still folded under her breasts, grazed against his bare torso. She dropped her hands, but ended up with her arms alongside her body, also trapped within the circle of the whip.

  She thought he might have smiled, or maybe that was wishful thinking. The shadows were too deep, his body backlit by the torchlight that haloed his shoulders in orange and gold.

  “You may not know me, but I know you.” He released the coils of the whip, and the dense leather slid down her body, thudding as it landed on the ground around her feet. His free hand came out, catching the edges of her robe and drawing them together so that he held a fistful of fabric right at her belly button.